A Framework for Transformations of XML within the Binary Domain

Keywords

Binary Encoded XML, MPEG-7, BiM, XML
transformations

Abstract

Since XML-formatted content and data is becoming the
medium of communication par excellence on intranets
and the Internet, the requirements to minimize the
network load caused by XML-based traffic and the
processing time is more and more important. Due to the
verbosity of XML, the need for an efficient serialization
of XML data becomes more relevant. In order to reduce
this overhead, MPEG-7 Systems has developed a Binary
Format for Metadata (BiM) which provides an alternative
serialization that has good compression efficiency. At the
same time, BiM offers the possibility to manipulate XML
trees in the binary domain. This capability can be used to
perform adaptations of XML data in the binary domain.
Plenty of commercial and open source tools for
transforming XML documents are available, but all of
them operate on plain text XML and lack the capability to
adapt XML-based data in the binary domain. In this
paper, we present a framework for transforming binary
encoded XML documents. This framework enables the
efficient adaptation of XML data within the binary
domain, i.e., without additional encoding and/or decoding
overhead and is based on an optimized caching of the
resulting transformations.